by Diana Palmer
He chuckled softly. “You’re lovely to look at, Jadebud,” he said. “All pink and soft…”
“Curry…” she began irritably.
He laid a long, brown finger across her lips. “Don’t start any fights with me this morning. Last night’s too fresh in my memory.”
“Last night?” she asked curiously.
One dark eyebrow went up. “Don’t you remember what happened?”
She thought for a minute and shook her head. “It’s all hazy. What did I do?”
“You tried to undress me,” he said matter-of-factly. “Then you begged me to make love to you.”
She gasped in horror. “I didn’t!”
“Oh, but you did.” His eyes smiled at her. “I’ve never been more tempted to let a woman have her way with me,” he added.
“I wouldn’t have!” she breathed.
He caught a strand of her hair and tugged on it gently as he sat down on the bed beside her. “You really don’t remember?” he probed.
“Honestly, I don’t.” She saw the humor die out of his eyes, to be replaced by something dark and quiet and intriguing. “Curry, did I really do that?” she asked.
“You wanted it, all right,” he said solemnly. “God, so did I, but I’m not such a monster that I’d take advantage of a woman with a concussion.”
“But then you didn’t really want me, did you?” she asked unsteadily, her eyes on the sheet. “You’ve told me so often enough.”
He caught her chin and tilted her face up to his. His eyes were dark and quiet. “Haven’t you ever heard of camouflage?”
She shrugged. “I suppose.”
“I’ve wanted you for a long time. You can’t know how it’s been with me these past few weeks.” His finger touched her mouth, traced it. “Do you remember that first night you came down the stairs with your hair down and your glasses off—when we’d had the blowup? I stood there and looked at you, and I felt a kind of hunger I never knew I was capable of feeling. But that was just the beginning. It got worse.”
Her eyes dropped to his chest. “You felt that way about Amanda,” she reminded him.
“No, Norie,” he corrected her. “Not after that. Not at all. The night I came home from Houston, when she’d tried her seduction act—I never told you the real reason I walked away from her. It was because I wanted you, and no other woman,” he said, meeting her gaze levelly.
Her face mirrored the astonishment she was feeling.
“Curry, I don’t understand,” she breathed.
“Don’t you? And all the time I thought you were eating your heart out for Jim Black. I wanted to break his neck. He could get close to you, and I couldn’t. At least, not until the night the bull gored me,” he said with a smile. “The first time I kissed you on the porch, I thought he’d been giving you lessons, and when I found out that you were untouched…I had nightmares about what might happen to you with him. The night after I got hurt, I wanted so much to teach you all the things a woman needs to know with a man…I damned near let it go too far. After that, it was a losing battle to keep my hands to myself. When I lapsed, and I did, I took it out on you because I couldn’t let you see how much power you had over me.”
“Me?” she asked incredulously.
“Last night,” he said quietly, “you did this…” He unbuttoned the top buttons of his shirt, and taking her hand, slid it inside the opening against the moist, bronzed flesh of his body. “It was the first time you ever touched me of your own free will, and you could see the effect it had on me. You wanted me, Eleanor.”
She looked deep into his silver eyes, and it all came back. She remembered how she’d felt, what she’d done….
Her fingers moved on his broad chest, touching, loving, exploring.
“I don’t want to fight you anymore,” she said in a soft, yielding tone.
“What do you want, honey?” he asked gently.
“To love you,” she said simply, “for as long as you’ll let me.”
His eyes searched her flushed face. “Love, in the physical sense or in a deeper sense, Eleanor?”
“Both,” she admitted, letting go of her pride as a child might let go of a helium-filled balloon and watch it sail away.
“And if I took you up on that?” he murmured. “If I asked you to come into my bedroom with me, right now, and lock the door?”
She bit her lower lip hard. “I…I’d go,” she said, swallowing nervously.
His eyes closed for an instant, as if in relief. “Are you telling me that you love me, Eleanor?”
Tears misted in her eyes. “Didn’t you know, Curry?” she asked brokenly. “For three long years!”
He gathered her into his hard arms and crushed her against him, his face buried in the thick, soft hair at her throat. His arms trembled as they contracted around her softness.
“When I got to you yesterday, after the fall,” he said huskily, “I held you, listening for a heartbeat that I prayed to hear; begging you not to die. And you reached up to hold my head closer and you said, ‘Jim?”’ He drew a shaky breath. “And I wanted to ride over a cliff.”
“I…I remember,” she murmured. “I remember thinking that Jim was the only man who’d care whether I lived or died. I really didn’t think it would matter to you.”
“If you’d died, I wouldn’t have survived you by five minutes,” he said matter-of-factly, drawing back to look down into her soft, quiet eyes. “Eleanor, I’m in love with you,” he said softly.
The sweetness of those words changed her, brightened her, made her suddenly beautiful. “Oh, Curry…” she whispered.
“We’ll talk later,” he breathed, bending to her mouth. “Right now, I’m so hungry I can hardly bear it. Come here, honey….”
He brought her up in his arms and kissed her, long and slow and thoroughly, coaxing her slender young hands to unbutton his shirt, to touch him as he caressed her. Fires burned slowly between them until the room seemed to go around in a burst of flame.
“Oh, God, we’ve got to stop this,” he whispered shakenly, putting her from him. He stood up, looking down at his handiwork with eyes full of love as she fastened buttons and blushed under the possessive gaze. “Why don’t you marry me?”
“Isn’t it a high price to pay?” she teased.
“I want more than your body, little innocent,” he told her, and his eyes darkened lovingly. “I want those sons we talked about once. And picnics by the river. Long nights when we can sit together and talk about the good old days. I want everything with you. A lifetime of memories to store day by day.”
“Can we have a church wedding, with all the trimmings?” she asked.
“And a white gown…if we hurry,” he added wickedly.
She blushed. “I’ll get Bessie to start on it tomorrow.”
He leaned down and brushed her mouth with his. “Today,” he corrected. “If I remember my ‘Cinderella’s’ correctly, the prince didn’t waste any time getting her to the altar when the glass slipper fit.”
He kissed her once, hard, and pulled her up. “Let’s go break the news to your fairy godmother,” he said with a loving smile. “Think she’ll approve?”
Eleanor tossed her hair and laughed as she hadn’t in weeks. “She’ll have to. She loves you almost as much as I do.”
He threw an arm around her shoulder and led her to the door. “When we break the news we’ll go down to the river,” he murmured wickedly, “and I’ll let you finish what you started last night.”
“Only this time,” she said grinning, “I won’t have a concussion.”
He drew her closer beside him. “That’s what I’m counting on,” he teased gently.
She felt the soft pressure of his mouth at her temple as they started down the stairs.
“Going somewhere?” Bessie asked them as they started down.
“On a picnic,” Eleanor said dreamily. “We’re getting married!”
“Good for you!” Bessie said with a beaming smile. “Now that you
’ve made the announcement, don’t you think there’s something you’d better do?”
They stared at her, then at each other.
“Well, Norie, you can’t go picnicking like that!” The housekeeper frowned. “What would the neighbors say?”
Eleanor looked down at the pale green gown and sighed. “That,” she sighed, “is one black mark in my fairy godmother’s book.”
And she ran back up the stairs to change, her heart moving to a waltz. The fantasy had become real.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-4235-1
DREAM’S END
First published as a MacFadden Romance by Kim Publishing Corporation.
Copyright © 1979 by Diana Palmer.
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